When former U.S. congressman and Obama administration chief of staff Rahm Emanuel marched triumphantly into the Chicago mayor's office in 2011, he promised to revamp Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in ways that had barely been contemplated in 16 years of mayoral control over the city's sprawling public-school system. This article discusses and…

The idea that one of the Catholic Church's most respected religious orders might run a public school sounded odd, maybe even, as Francis Cardinal George, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, conjectured, illegal. But a decade ago several trends in American education, and in the Catholic Church, made a Catholic-operated public school seem…

Most studies focus on the effects of charter attendance on short-term student achievement (test scores), using either data sets that follow students over time or random assignment via school admission lotteries to control for differences between students in charter and traditional public schools. Beyond measuring achievement effects, however,…

New Leaders for New Schools is the brainchild of a group of graduates from Harvard's business and education schools, including CEO Jonathan Schnur, a former Clinton administration official. New Leaders was designed to supply new blood to cities that were reportedly facing shortages of qualified principals ready to turn around dysfunctional…

Supporters believe that the flexibility granted these new public schools allows them to be more innovative and responsive to student needs than traditional public schools are. But do students in charter schools learn more than their counterparts in traditional public schools? In order to answer this question, the authors have analyzed established…